Welcoming the vote of the British Parliament while supporting the Syrian uprising

The best
way to “punish” the Syrian regime is to enable the popular uprising to break
it, not to bomb the country.

In a rare
instance of the executive in a Western imperial state taking “parliamentary
democracy” in earnest, the UK government consulted Parliament about military
action against the Syrian regime without being certain in advance that it would
win the vote, and decided to respect the outcome that repudiated its plan. As a
staunch opponent of the Syrian Baathist regime from a radical democratic
perspective, I have several reasons to welcome this outcome.

The first
reason is that any limitation on the powers of the imperial executive
that has become the usual pattern in most major Western states is undoubtedly positive
from a democratic point of view and should be greeted unreservedly. Even though,
on the face of it, the decision in this instance spared one of the most
ruthless and murderous dictatorships, the fact that the British government asked
Parliament for authorisation to engage in a military action purported to be “limited”
sets a standard that it will be more difficult from now on for the British
government and its peers in electoral democracies to ignore. Although a
repetition of the British scenario in Washington is most unlikely, the pressure on the US administration itself is mounting as a result of the British vote.
This is in spite of the post-Vietnam War Powers Resolution that “limited” the US executive’s
power to wage war to 60 days without an authorisation from Congress, a
resolution that the White House has nevertheless repeatedly violated.

Not that I
have the slightest illusion about the reasons for which many hawkish MPs voted
against military action this time. They did so not out of “pacifism” for sure,
let alone “anti-imperialism”, but for the same reason that made Western opinion
makers in their vast majority display a patent lack of sympathy for the cause
of the Syrian popular uprising. This reason is above all the lack of confidence
in the Syrian uprising, as US Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey openly confessed most recently. A consideration that
is all the more compelling in that the most recent experience in Libya was a
total fiasco in that regard: NATO’s intervention only helped turn Libya less
West-friendly than it had been under Gaddafi during the last years of his reign.
And, of course, Libya offered the major enticement of being a major oil
exporter, which Syria is not.

The second reason to welcome the vote by the British Parliament is that
it was clearly related to the requirement of a UN legitimation – which prompted the UK government
to submit a draft resolution to the UN Security Council in its attempt to
convince a majority of MPs. Despite the obvious limitations of the UN and of existing
international law, it is better that international relations be institutionalised
under some form of the rule of law, however deficient that law is, than be
dominated by the “law of the jungle” whereby powerful states, the US above all,
feel free to decide unilaterally against whom and when to use force. The idea
that the rule of law is a straightjacket by which Russia and China can prevent
truly humanitarian actions from taking place is predicated on the view that Western
military interventions are generally motivated by noble intentions. They are
definitely not. Suffice it to note that the two Western military interventions since
the end of the Cold War that most blatantly violated international law – Kosovo 1999 and Iraq 2003 – both used humanitarian
pretexts as covers for imperial designs and led to catastrophic humanitarian
results.

The third
reason to welcome the parliamentary vote is the one most directly predicated on
my resolute support to the Syrian popular uprising. The military action that is
being contemplated by Washington is about dealing the murderous Syrian regime a
few military blows in order to “punish” it for the use of chemical weapons
against civilians. I have hardly any doubt that the Syrian regime did resort to
such weapons in its barbaric onslaught on the Syrian people. True, it will be
hard for the UN inspection team, which was allowed to reach the scene of the
crime only several days after it was perpetrated, to find any smoking gun. But
the fact that the Syrian regime possesses chemical weapons and the means to
strike with them (to mount a large
scale rocket and artillery attack, as did happen) is beyond doubt, as is its cold-blooded-serial-killer
aptitude to use them on civilians. Witness this recorded use of an incendiary bomb dropped by a fighter jet on a
civilian target (a school playground): in this case at least, no one can
reasonably dispute the fact that the regime has the monopoly of air power in
the Syrian civil war. But this begs the question: is killing up to fifteen
hundred people with chemical weapons more serious a crime than killing over a
hundred thousand with “conventional” weapons? Why then does Washington want to
strike now suddenly after placidly watching the Syrian people being
slaughtered, its country devastated, and survivors in the millions turned into
refugees and displaced persons?

The truth
is that the forthcoming strikes are only intended as a means to restore the
“credibility” of the US and its allies in the face of an alliance of the
Syrian, Iranian, and Russian governments that has taken full liberty in
escalating the war on the Syrian people despite all US calls for compromise.
The strikes are necessary in order to reinstate a US imperial standing that has
been much humiliated over the last few years in Iraq, in Afghanistan, by Iran,
and even by Israel’s Netanyahu. These strikes will not help the Syrian people:
they will increase the destruction and death toll without enabling the Syrians to
get rid of their tyrant. They are not intended for this latter goal. In fact,
Washington does not want the Syrian people to topple the dictatorship: it wants
to force on the Syrian opposition a deal with the bulk of the regime, minus
Assad. This is the so-called Yemen solution that President Barack Obama has
been actively pursuing since last year, and that Secretary of State John Kerry
has been trying to promote by cozying up to his Russian counterpart.

However, by
denying the mainstream of the Syrian opposition the defensive anti-aircraft and
antitank weapons that they have been requesting for almost two years, while
Russia and Iran were abundantly purveying the Syrian regime with weapons (and
recently with combatants from Iran and its regional allies), the US
administration only managed to achieve two results: on the one hand, it has
allowed the Syrian regime to keep the upper hand militarily and thus to believe
that it can win; hence, the regime has had no incentive whatsoever to make any
concessions. On the other hand, benefitting from generous funding from Wahhabi
sources and after an initial push from the Syrian regime itself (including the
release of Jihadists from Syrian jails in the early phase of the uprising by a
regime eager to portray the popular revolt as Sunni fundamentalist), Jihadist
networks that were already present in neighbouring Iraq (where the Syrian
regime itself contributed to their development) were able to impose themselves
as an important component of the Syrian uprising.

That is why
the Syrian people don’t trust Washington in the least. Witness this reportage
in the Washington Post:

Syrians
would prefer to overthrow Assad without foreign help, but if the West does
carry out strikes, the Free Syrian Army intends to take advantage of any
disarray in the ranks of regime forces to advance its own positions, said Louay
al-Mokdad, political and media coordinator for the FSA.

“We are
going, for sure, to make the most of this operation to increase our situation
on the ground, to try and control and liberate more areas,” he said. “This is
our right. Our fighters on the ground should use anything, even a change in the
weather if it will help them, and if your enemy faces another side, we should
use this.”

However,
those who support intervention expressed concerns about how the strikes would
unfold and what effect they would have – if any – on the raging war that has
killed more than 100,000 people.

“People
here are very worried the strikes will be intended to help the regime,” said
Abu Hamza, an activist in the Damascus suburb of Darayya, where some of the
fiercest battles of the war have left a town of nearly 500,000 a ravaged,
emptied ruin. “Of course I support it if it means ending the bloodshed, but
there has been killing for 2.5 years, so why should we believe the United
States is serious now?”

“People
lost trust in the U.S. government,” he added. “They think the U.S. will only
act for its own benefit.”

Had Western
powers really cared for the Syrian people – or even had Washington been more
clever in creating the conditions for the compromise it has been seeking – it
would have been easy for them to equip the Syrian opposition with defensive
weapons, thus enabling the uprising to turn the tide of the war in such a way
as to precipitate a break-up of the regime. Short of a decisive shift in the
Syrian civil war to the disadvantage of the regime, the latter will remain
intransigent and united around the Assad clan, and the war will drag on with
its terrible consequences.

It is this
reality that refutes the argument of many well-meaning people that arms should
be denied to the Syrian opposition because the death toll will be increased. On
the contrary, it is precisely the regime’s advantage in weaponry that keeps the
war going and the death toll increasing. Let me here repeat the words of the
French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf (1795) that I quoted in my latest book:

But what
civil war is more revolting than the one that puts all the murderers on one
side and all the defenceless victims on the other? Can you accuse someone who
wants to arm the victims against the murderers of committing a crime?

In the face
of the horrible crimes being perpetrated by the Assad regime with the support
of Russia, Iran and Iran’s allies, it is the duty of all those who claim to
support the right of peoples to self-determination to help the Syrian people
get the means of defending themselves.

About the author

Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His most recent book is Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising,US, UK. His previous books have been translated into more than fifteen languages. Also by the same author, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising(Saqi and University of California Press), The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (2nd ed., Saqi, 2006) and The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Saqi, 2010). He is the chairperson of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS.

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